Completely made up. Barack Obamaâs birth was reported and recorded by the hospital in Hawaii along with those of other babies born at the same time, and automatically sent not only to the registrar of vital statistics but to the local newspaper, just like all the others. His parents were poor students and could not afford to visit Kenya, his fatherâs homeland, a trip that would have taken weeks and cost more per person than the average college-educated American made at the time. His parents broke up and his low-income American teen mother received food stamps for herself and him . He went to school in Hawaii, and school records exist, and then after his mother went abroad with him and remarried, briefly attended a public school there, where records showed he was American and he as bullied, and then the local Catholic School , St. Francis of Assisi, where he was known to be an American with an American mother, a local stepfather, and a local half-sister. He then returned to the US to live with his middle-class American grandparents, attend American schools, work in a restaurant part-time at 14/15 (requiring standard US working papers) and work in a nursing home part-time from the time he turned 16 until graduating from high school. He then applied for and was accepted to college, just like other young Americans his age, on the basis of his American high school records and test scores, and qualified, like other Americans, for Pell Grant and Federal student loans as an undergraduate, and Federal student loans as a law student. (Foreign students require student visas, generally the TOEFL exam, and proof of either family money or a pledge from their foreign government to cover their tuition and living expenses in full, since t are unable to work here and do not qualify for Federal student aid.) He graduated, worked in the US as a community organizer and lawyer and law school lecturer, and ran for office and won. He did travel abroad as a young man; there was no question about his renewal of the US passport under which he traveled as a child. (âBirthersâ have tried to claim that one of his grandfatherâs multiple wives, Sarah Obama, claimed he was born in Kenya, in Mombasaâ she does not speak English, has said no such thing, is not his grandmother, and Mombasa is and was not in territory that was part of Kenya at the time of his birth.) No one questioned his US birth until he ran for President; he quickly released his birth certificate, and sensible people did not continue to argue he was a British subject or a native of Kenya (a country which was a colony of Britain at the time he was born). âBirthersâ produced blatantly forged foreign birth certificates which were easily tracked to the documents t had been forged from and which showed a complete lack of understanding of history and geography. (It is interesting that George Romney, Ted Cruz, and John McCain were all born outside of the US, but ran for office with very little question as to their US citizenship.)
The most recent birthers' attempt to have Obama declared a foreigner, born in Indonesia and therefore ineligible to become President, failed in court, as he is a natural-born US citizen. ÂBirthersâ also produced bogus documents which they claimed showed him to be a terrorist, a drug dealer, and a member of the Communist Party, to name a few, while all of this evidence was based on their knowing, very little, or no knowledge of the fact that all these things were documented from the start, and were widely known. ÂBirthersâ invented or claimed to have been taught by their father, Barack Hussein Obama, about his alleged life story as the black brother from Kenya and Indonesia, who had traveled to Hawaii in the 1960s to study law and to teach. (One of his sons still holds that position in the Illinois state legislature and is quite popular among the.